A kouros is a statue of a standing nude youth that did not represent any one individual youth but the idea of youth. Used in Archaic Greece as both a dedication to the gods in sanctuaries and as a grave monument, the standard kouros stood with his left foot forward, arms at his sides, looking straight ahead. Carved in from four sides, the statue retained the general shape of the marble block. Archaic Greek sculptors reduced human anatomy and musculature in these statues to decorative patterning on the surface of the marble.

The kouros embodies many of the ideals of the aristocratic culture of Archaic Greece. One such ideal of this period was arete, a combination of moral and physical beauty and nobility. Arete was closely connected with kalokagathia, literally a composite term for beautiful and good or noble. - The Getty Museum

Along with a newly developed taste for monumental sculpture, Archaic period artists developed a starkly different tradition in vase painting. By mid-sixth century, Athenian painters adopt black-figure style from Corinthians.

Zeus, seated on a rock, gives birth to the god Dionysos from his thigh. Hermes stands by holding the royal sceptre of his father in one hand, and in his other, his own herald’s wand. Attic Red Figure, ca. 470 - 460 BCE.

The Classic Period
ca. 480 - 323 BCE

Calf-bearer, ca. 570 BCE. Marble, 65" high.

Kroisos (Kouros from Anavysos), ca. 525 BCE. Marble, height 6'4".

Kritios Boy, ca. 480 BCE. Marble, height 46".

contrapposto = the disposition of the human figure in which one part is turned in opposition to another part (usually hips and legs one way, shoulders and chest another), creating a counterpositioning of the body along its central axis.

In the mid fifth century BCE, the sculptor Polykleitos of Argos set out make a "perfect" statue constructed according to an all-encompassing mathematical formula, the Pythagorean theorem. - Janson's

"[Beauty consists] in the proportions, not the elements, but of the parts, that is to say, of finger to finger, and of all the fingers to the palm and the wrist, and of these to the forearm, and of the forearm to the upper arm, and of all the other parts to each other" - Gardner's History of Art